The Grief Nurse is a fantasy gothic thriller, and debut novel, by Angie Spoto. BooksfromScotland caught up with her to find out more about the book.

The Grief Nurse
By Angie Spoto
Published by Sandstone Press

Can you tell us about The Grief Nurse?

The Grief Nurse is set in a world where the wealthy elite don’t have to feel grief. Grief nurses, people who can sense and take grief, are indentured to only the wealthiest, most influential families. The story follows Lynx, who is a grief nurse for the Aster family. The story begins when the eldest Aster son dies and the Asters host a death party on their isolated island estate. Shortly after guests flock to the island and the party begins, the first mysterious death occurs, and the bodies quickly start to pile up. Lynx becomes entangled in solving the mystery of what is causing the deaths. The story is an exploration of Lynx’s own stigma against grief and grieving and follows her as she comes to understand the true power of grief.

What inspired you to write The Grief Nurse?

Victorian women were required to wear black for years after the deaths of their husbands. I heard once (though I can’t remember where!) that some wealthy women would hire women to wear black for them, effectively paying someone to mourn in their stead. I thought – what if we took that one step further? What if you could hire someone to take your grief entirely?

Your writing style is so lyrical – can you tell us about your methods?

I think my style must come from the stories and authors that have inspired me. You wouldn’t necessarily know it when reading The Grief Nurse, but I’m very much inspired by women surrealists, authors like Leonora Carrington and painters like Dorothea Tanning. These women were doing something very special with Surrealism – you look at their work and can see how influenced they were by fairy tales and the Gothic. Carrington’s style, for example, is filled with absolutely stunning (and grotesque!) imagery. I think my style must have been influenced by her and others!

The setting of a story can add so much texture (and both the house and the island really do!). Why did you choose this setting?

I love the Gothic so it’s no surprise that I love big, old houses. I knew right away when I started writing The Grief Nurse that I wanted it to be set in an estate home, but I wanted it to be very different than traditional Edwardian manor houses or even conventional spooky Gothic mansions. Because I chose to associate the colour white with grief in the world of The Grief Nurse, I wanted to create a house that was trying its very best to be the opposite – so a house filled with colour inside and out. I didn’t completely settle on a vision until I visited the Isle of Bute and the Mount Stewart estate. Mount Stewart is really unlike any estate home I’ve ever seen; it has this gorgeous great hall on the ceiling of which are painted constellations. The house is filled with unusual details like coloured skylights and bright colours. I knew as soon as I saw it that I wanted Mount Sorcha, the estate home in The Grief Nurse, to feel like Mount Stewart. Mount Stewart is on the Isle of Bute, which is a small western Scottish island. It was at that point that I decided to place Mount Sorcha on an island too – it helps that it really increases the sense of claustrophobia and isolation!

What was the most challenging part of writing this book?

The grief! Aside from the fact that the book made me face up and really closely examine my own grief, actually writing about grief in a kind of ‘magical’ way was difficult. Grief is complicated! No two people experience grief in the same way, and how we experience grief changes throughout our lives. Grief can feel one way one day and completely different the next. I think I could have gone a very simplistic route and said, ‘grief is a rose’ and ‘grief is a fire’ but once you start to really examine grief, you realise that an authentic depiction of grief is never going to be simple. That’s why I settled on depicting characters experiencing grief in different ways and exploring their varied relationships with grief.

While The Grief Nurse is fantasy, it reads like a book that required research. What was the most interesting or strange thing you found out while researching that didn’t make it into the book?

I actually read a couple books on Scottish deer stalking. I was determined to have a deer stalking scene in the book – this just felt so indicative of the wealthy, aristocratic family I created, and it was a great excuse to show off the Scottish-inspired landscape. Also, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy was a useful read – for obvious reasons!

The Grief Nurse by Angie Spoto is published by Sandstone Press, priced £16.99.